1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to managing the provisioning and lifecycle of logical components in a collaborative content.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include document libraries, instant messaging, discussion forums (chat rooms), and application sharing.
Conventional collaborative computing includes combinations of collaborative technologies in order to provide a means for members of a collaborative community to pool the strengths and experiences of the collaborators to achieve a common goal. A collaborative computing environment generally can be defined by (1) a particular context, specifically the objective of the environment, (2) membership, specifically the participants in the environment, (3) a set of roles for the members, and (4) resources and tools which can be accessed by the membership in furtherance of the objective of the environment. Roles are names given to the people in the environment which dictate access to the resources and tools within the environment as well as define the behavior of the community members.
Collaborative computing environments typically can be customized by the developer of each environment in order to meet the needs both of developers and users. For instance, several customized collaborative computing environments have been created such as team workspaces, e-meetings, virtual classrooms and virtual communities. Notably, each of these types of environments has been implemented using shared resources as a building block to create the environment. Nevertheless, customized collaborative computing environments can be rigid and immutable due to their customization.
Self-service applications and end user self-provisioning are at the core of any collaborative computing environment. Self-service collaborative systems allow collaborators to initiate and create instances of a collaborative environment when and where the collaborators demand a collaborative environment. Self-service collaborative systems further allow collaborators to manage the collaborative resources in the environment on demand without requiring specific expertise outside of the group of collaborative participants in the collaborative community.
The support for self-provisioning of collaborative resources like group workspaces and e-meetings are at the core of the value proposition that collaborative applications bring to the consumer. This capability is a key differentiator of collaborative applications when compared to classical, IT-managed component based Web applications. Still, any application which supports self-service and end user self-provisioning removes the responsibility for creating, granting access, and managing the content and life cycle of shared resources from the hands of the IT department and places this responsibility into the hands of the end-user collaborators.
While the reliance upon collaborators for environment creation and management is intended and desired to support the demand-driven, ad-hoc nature of collaboration, this reliance runs counter to the notion that professional IT managers ought to retain an ability to centrally monitor and restrain the usage of the collaborative environment. Specifically, IT managers ought to maintain control over the collaborative environment in order to prevent excessive use of storage, bandwidth or processor resources as well as to prevent uncontrolled storage of information, expiration of data, unauthorized access or the abuse of the enterprise environment. Thus, collaborative environments seem internally conflicted with the needs and requirements of professional IT management. In particular, the very mechanism intended to relieve IT management from the burden of creating on-demand collaborative environments can burden IT management with addressing the consequences of end-user self-provisioning.